


You Are What You Eat

by flawedamythyst



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Disturbing Content, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-17
Updated: 2011-04-17
Packaged: 2017-10-18 05:54:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/185708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flawedamythyst/pseuds/flawedamythyst





	You Are What You Eat

After they had finished up with the paramedics, and the police, and the inevitable visitation from Mycroft, and finally made it home, the first thing John did was explain to Sherlock, at length and at volume, why going to meet a criminal mastermind on your own without telling anyone was the height of incredible stupidity. He used rather a lot of colourful language to emphasis his point, including several phrases that he hadn't used since he'd left the army, and included a brief analysis of Sherlock's psychological problems and personality deficiencies. He strode around their living room, gesturing wildly to punctuate his speech, and let the flow of emotion wipe out all the remnants of fear and queasiness that being Moriarty's hostage had left in his stomach.

He eventually finished up with, “And you bloody lied to me! You weren't ever intending to buy milk, you bloody bastard!”

Sherlock sat in silence throughout the entire diatribe, not attempting to defend himself or refute John's points but not ignoring him either. He kept his eyes fixed on John's face for the entire thing, with a hint of a smile caught in his lips.

John scowled at him when there was no immediate reaction beyond a widening of the smile. “I'm glad my anger is a source of pleasure for you,” he said bitterly.

“It's not,” said Sherlock. “But the fact that you are still alive to be angry is.”

That completely disarmed John's temper in one go, leaving him feeling deflated. He sank down into his chair with a sigh. “You bloody bastard,” he repeated in an exhausted voice.

Sherlock's smile just grew a bit more.

 

The speech had no effect on Sherlock's behaviour at all, with only one exception; he actually took to doing the shopping on occasion. It wasn't quite what John had hoped he'd take away from the it, but he'd take what he could get.

Not that Sherlock's approach to shopping was in anyway reliable, or even all that helpful when you came down to it. If he was passing a shop and wasn't too distracted, he'd pop in and grab a few things, but the things he bought rarely had any relation to each other, or to what they actually needed. He'd buy a bag of pasta every day for a week but no sauces to put on it, or come home with a bag full of assorted herbs and a pineapple, then not bother for weeks once a case came along and distracted him.

The one thing he always managed to buy was baked beans. At least one or two tins every time he went into a shop, until they had an entire cupboard full and John had started giving them away to anyone he could get to accept anything that had once been in the kitchen at 221B. Unfortunately, too many people had seen the remnants of Sherlock's experiments for that to be very many people, although he could usually get some of Sherlock's homeless informants to take them off his hands, as long as it was the ring-pull cans.

He never said anything about it to Sherlock. He wasn't sure if it was some weird form of Holmes-style apology, or if Sherlock's brain had just got set on beans and he didn't realise he was doing it, but John was perfectly prepared to take it as the gesture it was possibly meant to be and let the fact they had enough beans to survive a zombie apocalypse go. After all, given some of the situations that John had ended up in thanks to Sherlock, a zombie apocalypse didn't seem all that far-fetched.

 

He came home one day from a shift at the surgery to find Sherlock engrossed in his laptop and the evidence of a shopping trip in the kitchen. There was a pyramid of beans tins in the middle of the table next to two packets of breadsticks and a tiny tub of jelly, and when John opened the fridge (with only a little bit of trepidation – Sherlock seemed to have finally learnt the 'anything disturbing should be covered and kept separate from food' lesson after John started to just move anything he deemed unacceptable from the fridge and onto Sherlock's bed) he found a bottle of strawberry milk and two steaks, carefully wrapped in butcher's paper.

Well, that was one of Sherlock's more successful shopping trips. They still had potatoes from Sherlock's last one, when he'd bought the largest sack of potatoes that John had ever seen (God only knows how the hell he got it home) and cinnamon sticks, so tonight they would be able to have a real meal for once. The prospect made John smile to himself as he stacked the tins of beans with all the others, put the breadsticks in the bread bin (there was hardly ever any actual bread in it and breadsticks seemed a lot more appropriate than the desiccated frog John had found in it last week) and the jelly in the cupboard he mentally thought of as 'random crap that Sherlock briefly thought was a good idea', next to the cinnamon sticks.

“I'm going to have a shower, then cook dinner,” he told Sherlock.

Sherlock just grunted in reply, clearly too engrossed in whatever he was doing on his laptop to listen. John didn't bother waiting for a real response and headed to the bathroom, wondering if he could get away with serving baked beans with steak and potatoes. They had, after all, had them three nights this week already and it was only Thursday.

In the end he went for it – Sherlock never seemed to notice what he was putting in his mouth anyway, and John liked beans enough to put up with them for a fourth time. He put Sherlock's plate on the desk next to him, where it was ignored for the moment, but he'd eat it eventually – when he wasn't actually on a case, Sherlock would eat if something was left in his vicinity for long enough. John left him to it and tucked into his own meal.

The steaks were a bit different – now that they were cooked, they actually seemed more like pork than beef, but that wasn't quite right either. John wondered which butcher Sherlock had got them from, because they definitely weren't from Tesco's. Probably someone who owed him a favour, like the long list of restaurant owners that John had been introduced to over the last few months, all of them with some story of how Sherlock had saved them or their family.

When Sherlock did, finally, take enough notice of his food to reach for a fork, he ate a few bites then stopped and tore his attention away from his laptop to stare at the plate for a long moment.

“John,” he said slowly. “Where did you get this meat?”

“From the fridge,” said John. “It's what you bought today.”

There was a pause.

“When you went shopping,” John prompted, wondering if Sherlock had already deleted that from his memory or if it just hadn't been interesting enough to get recorded in the first place.

“Ah, yes,” said Sherlock. He poked at the meat gently with his fork, then added, “You might want to stop eating.”

John stopped mid-bite. “Oh god,” he said. “It's not poisoned or something, is it? I've told you, you have to label these things!”

Sherlock bent closer to his plate in order to examine the meat more closely. “It's not poisoned,” he said, sounding oddly distant. “I went shopping today on the way home from the morgue,” he added.

“What is wrong with it then?” asked John, poking at it. It looked fine to him, but god only knew what Sherlock had taken into his mind to do to perfectly good meat. “I've eaten half already – should I be worried?”

“On my way home from the morgue,” repeated Sherlock, carefully emphasising each word.

For a moment John wondered why he was repeating himself and if he'd broken his brain somehow, and then the word _morgue_ sunk in fully. He looked back down at the previously-unidentified meat.

“Oh God,” he said in a weak voice. He felt his stomach clench and stood up abruptly, rushing to the bathroom just in time to throw up everything he could down the toilet.

Sherlock followed him but stayed in the doorway while John vomited. “It was for a tissue analysis,” he said, as if that was enough of an excuse.

“It was cut into steaks!” said John, between retches. “What the hell have I told you about labelling things?”

“I was going to, then I had an idea on how to analyse the Moriarty data,” said Sherlock, as if that was enough of an explanation. Depressingly, it almost was – John knew exactly how myopic Sherlock got when it came to tracking down Moriarty, and it wasn't as if he wasn't 100% behind catching the bastard as soon as possible. Still, there were definite lines that should not be crossed under any circumstances, and leaving human steaks in the fridge and not warning your flatmate was one of them.

Oh god, he'd eaten human steak. He could still taste it as well, underneath the bile. “Get me the mouthwash,” he demanded. “Wait, no, that's not going to cut it. Get me the vodka.”

Sherlock spun away and was back a moment later with a bottle of vodka that John took a swig of and swilled around his mouth for as long as he could stand it, then spat out again. It had the added bonus of making him gag again so that he threw up more of whatever was left in his stomach. He took another long gulp of vodka as soon as he was done.

“You're going to be angry about this,” noted Sherlock.

John pulled himself together enough to glare at him. “I'm already bloody angry about this,” he said. “I'm just too busy being disgusted to express myself fully yet. Don't worry, I'm sure I'll find time later.” He took another swig from the bottle. If he got drunk quickly enough, maybe the memory would get buried under the alcohol and he'd be able to forget the juicy, slightly-salty taste.

Oh god, who was he kidding? He was never going to forget that taste. He was going to die with it still on his tongue. And the worst thing was, he'd been quite enjoying it. He groaned hopelessly to himself and drank more vodka.

Sherlock seemed to be hovering uncertainly in the doorway, in as much as he was ever uncertain. “Is there anything I can do to lessen your anger?”

John glared at him. “Wipe my memory,” he suggested. Sherlock looked for a moment as if he was contemplating ways of doing that. “Get rid of that stuff,” said John before Sherlock went off to invent an amnesia pill. “All of it. I never want to see it again.”

“Right,” said Sherlock and left.

John took a deep breath and wondered if maybe he should get up off the floor and get himself back together, then drank more vodka instead of doing either. By the time Sherlock came back, he was already starting to feel rather light-headed.

“It's too bad,” said Sherlock. “You did cook it rather well.”

Oh typical, the one time Sherlock complimented his cooking and it was when he cooked human flesh.

Oh god, he'd cooked human flesh. And then eaten it. He was in a group with a tiny minority of the very creepiest kind of serial killers, the kind of men whose mugshots Sherlock had on his bedroom wall.

He took another drink from the bottle, then carefully stood up. “I'm going to get very, very drunk,” he announced. “You're never going to speak of this again. Are we clear?”

Sherlock nodded. “I can do that,” he said. There was another odd hesitation and he said, almost reluctantly, “You're not- That is, I realise that this is not good, and you're going to be angry, but you're not going to-” He stopped again, then took a deep breath and fixed a steady look on John. “You're not going to leave over this, are you?”

The thought hadn't even occurred to John. He wondered what that said about him – accidental cannibalism (oh GOD, he's a cannibal!) was almost certainly way over the line that most people had for acceptable flatmate behaviour. Sherlock was looking at him with a face that was carefully blank but John could see the faintest trace of vulnerability in his eyes.

He took a deep breath. “No,” he said. “I'm probably an even bigger idiot that the genius who doesn't think to label human steaks, but I'm not going to leave.”

Sherlock's face lit up with a wide grin. “It's an illogical taboo, anyway, when you think about it,” he started. “Why on earth should we worry about what meat was before-”

“Stop talking,” said John quickly, holding up a hand. Mercifully, Sherlock did. “You can't keep doing this sort of thing. I'm serious, Sherlock.”

“Of course,” said Sherlock. “I'll pay more attention in future. Now come and get drunk – I've never seen you properly drunk.”

John followed him back out to the sitting room, where all traces of their meal had disappeared. “Then you're in for a real treat,” he said. “Especially if I end up singing.”

“If you do, I'll accompany you on the violin,” promised Sherlock. Oh, this was going to be a really special evening.

 

Two days later, John's shift got cut in half because the surgery was so quiet, and he was able to go home at lunchtime. When he got in, Sherlock was eating a sandwich and idly flicking through a forensics journal.

“You're back early,” he noted. “Either London is suffering from a dearth of sick people, or Sarah has finally decided that working with an ex was awkward.”

“She's not really my ex,” said John. “We were barely seeing each other. And, that there's not many sick people is a _good thing_ , Sherlock, I wouldn't say London was 'suffering'.”

Sherlock made a dismissive noise. “As long as there's not a dearth of crime,” he said, turning back to his journal.

John allowed himself an eye roll then went into the kitchen. “Is there any bread left?” he asked. “I might have a sandwich too. What have you got in it?”

There was a silence of the kind that John had learnt to worry about. He turned to see Sherlock trying to pretend he was engrossed in an article.

“Sherlock,” he said slowly. “What are you eating?”

Sherlock let out a sigh. “You made me promise not to mention it again,” he said.

John's eyes riveted on the sandwich. He could see a tiny scrap of meat poking out. “Oh god,” he said. “Please tell me it's not-”

“It seemed such a shame to waste it,” said Sherlock. “You really did cook it very well. It tastes even better with a bit of mustard.”

John let out a despairing noise and shut his eyes. God damn his life.


End file.
